Leonardo’s Nude Man Unites Earth, Cosmos With His Eight Limbs

March 20 (Bloomberg) -- You know the drawing: a male
nude facing front, becurled and muscular, with two sets of
arms and legs, one touching the circumference of a circle,
the other the sides of a square. In “Da Vinci’s Ghost,” the
journalist Toby Lester peers closely at Leonardo’s
“Vitruvian Man” -- its origins, its meaning and the
circumstances of the artist who drew it.

It’s called “Vitruvian Man” because the idea for it
came from “Ten Books on Architecture,” written by a Roman
military engineer named Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. For the
Romans, architecture meant proportion, which meant the
body.

“No temple can be put together coherently,” Vitruvius
wrote, “unless it conforms exactly to the principle
relating the members of a well-shaped man.” He elaborated:

“If a man were placed on his back with his hands and
feet outspread, and the point of a compass put on his
navel, both his fingers and his toes would be touched by
the line of the circle going around him.”

Similarly, for a perfectly proportioned man with feet
together and hands outspread (a posture that later would
inevitably betoken the crucified Christ), “you would find
the breadth the same as the height, just as in areas that
have been squared with a set square.”

Body and Cosmos

Over time, the notion of the body as the locus
classicus of proportion became tied to the relationship
between the body and the cosmos -- the microcosm and the
macrocosm. The 12th-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen put
it this way:

“The firmament, as it were, is man’s head; sun, moon
and stars are as the eyes; air as the hearing; the winds
are as smell; dew as taste; the sides of the world are as
arms and as touch.”

A 13th-century map of the world shows the three
continents (Europe, Asia and Africa) bounded by a single
ocean, with the head of Christ at the top (east), his feet
at the bottom (west), and his outspread hands at the sides
(north and south).

Enter Leonardo. Born in a Tuscan hill town in 1452,
the artist who more than any other embodies our idea of the
Renaissance man was, in fact, indifferently educated.

Wounded Pride

During his early years in Florence and Milan, his lack
of Latin made him the butt of some condescension. Wounded
pride was probably among the motives for the furious course
of self-education that made him the Leonardo we know.

In Milan, he got involved in the intense debate over
how to engineer the dome for the huge cathedral that was
being constructed. Filippo Brunelleschi had immortalized
himself by providing the solution in Florence; Leonardo
wanted to become the Brunelleschi of Milan.

He never got the commission, but his studies in
architecture were what led him to Vitruvius -- whose
description of the ideally proportioned man was,
incidentally, unillustrated. Moreover, there was a problem
with Vitruvius’ description: The navel does not fall at the
geographical center of the human body. The genitals do.

Leonardo solved the problem by shifting his square
downward, so that it isn’t neatly superimposed over the
circle. That way the navel falls at the center of the
circle and the genitals at the center of the square.

In the course of investigating “Vitruvian Man,” Lester
offers fertile digressions on Roman sculpture, Christian
mysticism, medieval cathedral building, Florentine sexual
mores and Milanese power politics. He treats the drawing,
in fact, from every conceivable angle but one: This is not
a book about art.

Instead it’s a compact and entertaining treatise on
the history of ideas, written with the light touch of a
journalist who’s investigating a subject in which he
doesn’t pretend to be an expert, but who’s excited about
every nugget of information he’s digging up.

“Da Vinci’s Ghost: Genius, Obsession and How Leonardo
Created the World in His Own Image” is published by the
Free Press (275 pages, $26.99). To buy this book in North
America, click here.

(Craig Seligman is a critic for Muse, the arts and
leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed
are his own.)